Posted
by
Soulskill
on Saturday July 14, 2012 @03:52PM
from the morally-right-vs-legally-right dept.

New submitter UtucXul points out that Richard Stallman has penned a lengthy response to NPR intern Emily White for her post on the organization's site about how she failed to pay for a significant amount of recorded music, acquiring it instead through Kazaa, friends, and CDs owned by the radio station at which she was employed. (We previously discussed musician David Lowery's response; quite different from RMS's, as you might expect.) Stallman wrote,
"Copying and sharing recordings was not a mistake, let alone wrong, because sharing is good. It's good to share musical recordings with friends and family; it's good for a radio station to share recordings with the staff, and it's good when strangers share through peer-to-peer networks. The wrong is in the repressive laws that try to block or punish sharing. Sharing ought to be legalized; in the mean time, please do not act ashamed of having shared — that would validate those repressive laws that claim that it is wrong. You did make a mistake when you chose Kazaa as the method of sharing. Kazaa mistreated you (and all its users) by requiring you to run a non-free program on your computer. ... However, that was in the past. It's more important to consider what you're doing now, which includes other mistakes. You're not alone — many others make them too, and that adds up to a big problem for society. The root mistake is treating a marketing buzzword, 'the cloud,' as if it meant something concrete. That term refers to so many things (different ways of using the Internet) that it really has no meaning at all. Marketing uses that term to lead people's attention away from the important questions about any given use of the network, such as, 'What companies would I depend on if I did this, and how? What trouble could they cause me, if they wanted to shaft me, or simply thought that a change in policies would gain them more money?'"

The term "giving away" implies a situation where one party is deprived of something so another person can have it. This is not an accurate representation of Stallman's views, nor is is an accurate description of copyright infringement. When a copy is made and provided to another party, both parties now have the item in question.

RMS believes the above described behavior is morally correct, and should be universally allowed. Furthermore, he believes software is an entity unto itself that has rights, just as a person has rights. I happen to disagree with him on these points, but regardless of your position on such matters, it is very important to describe them correctly. Much as RMS has a long history of attempting to redefine the word "freedom" to suit his sociopolitical agenda, I must disagree with those who attempt to make statements on important matters such as these without getting their definitions right.

Give away doesn't necessarily mean anyone is deprived of anything. It often does, but not always.

If I watch your prize dog while you are on vacation, a pedigreed breeding dog and I give away his sperm to someone, I have given something of value away. But you aren't deprived of it, that sperm would have been dead by the time you got back from vacation and it would have been replaced by then with new live sperm anyway.

You'd do well to stick to the point at hand instead of trying to put up a semantic front.

Bad example. Actually, as the owner of the dog, I have been potentially deprived of something - the market for that dog's sperm. There may only be a handful of people in this world who would be interested in buying the dog's sperm for breeding purposes. Since you have gone and sold it to one of those people, my ability to make money off of that sperm when I return from vacation has been irreparably harmed.

Incidentally, I do fall on the side of supporting file sharing, as long as a person does not try to resell a person's music/software/etc for monetary gain.

By stealing it (and don't pretend it's anything but theft just to make yourself appear to be slightly more ethical), you are depriving the creators of money. If it's not worth buying, then don't steal it. Funny how my children managed to learn this at about the age of six.

Incidentally, I do fall on the side of supporting file sharing, as long as a person does not try to resell a person's music/software/etc for monetary gain.

So if the person watching your dog gave the sperm away for free, they didn't do it for monetary gain. So why not support the giving away of your dogs sperm? By participating in unauthorized file sharing, you are depriving the owners of that content from the market that desires what they have. There may only be a handful of people in this word interested in buying their content, but you still are affecting their ability to make money off of that content.

Bad example. Actually, as the owner of the dog, I have been potentially deprived of something - the market for that dog's sperm.

And by this argument, as the creator of a book, song, or film, I have been deprived of the market for my movie/film/song by your giving copies to other people for free.

So I'm not clear - you say you support sharing as long as it's not for financial gain... but then you say that giving something away (or providing a free copy of something) is depriving the creator/original owner of that item a market for their product.

You seem to be arguing that filesharing is okay, but you're trying to paint that the scenario above, where you're "deprived of a market for your product," is somehow injurious to you. So if someone's sharing activity is damaging to you... then how can it be morally correct? Whether they do it for a profit, or do it for free, it's simply a matter of how MUCH they've harmed you, not a question of whether or not they're harming you.

The term "giving away" implies a situation where one party is deprived of something so another person can have it. This is not an accurate representation of Stallman's views, nor is is an accurate description of copyright infringement. When a copy is made and provided to another party, both parties now have the item in question.

Wrong. The term giving away means whatever our society decides it means. There are clearly multiple scenarios in which the term can be used and trying to shoehorn a definition into just one or the other doesn't make sense. In the same way people discuss abortion and want a bright line between life and non-life...the world is more complex and there are lots of things that can't be neatly divided.

In the case of "giving away" copyrighted material...when people use that term pretty much everyone understands that it means we have an artificial system called copyright created for economic reasons and the "giving away" violated the rules of that system.

Trying to argue "but it's not theft" or "it's not the same as real property" misses the point...we all know that but we don't want to use a 17 word sentence to refer to the situation at hand.

Do we now? I've personally seen a fair number of people who really do believe it's theft. I've also seen people who didn't know what copyright infringement was and believed that it's actually theft in the most literal sense simply because many people happen to call it that. Calling what may be a crime in some places "theft" really can confuse people.

Why isn't it "theft". The word "theft" is just a shorthand for a variety of different situations, and ALL of them (including physical property) are based on artificial rules that we made up. Taking someone's chair isn't inherently wrong anymore than illegally taking a copy of copyrighted material - both are defined as problems due to the rules society created. Saying that one is theft and one isn't theft is not a meaningful distinction - they are both illegal activities because we said so and if everyone

In case you hadn't noticed, we commonly use single or multi-word phrases to represent much more complex ideas.

We refer to illegally making a copy of copyrighted material as "stealing" and we also refer to illegally taking possession of physical property as "stealing" - in neither case do we typically use the full explanatory sentence, instead we use words that represent the more complex idea.

You think it is wrong, and you are entitled to do so. Most of us do not, though, and in a democracy that is what matters. The majority forcing his way over minorities is not always a good thing, but it is what democracy is about, it is the price you pay to live in a democratic country. The other way around, when minorities force their way over the majority, is more often than not much worse.

Right and Wrong are subjective concepts. If most people want to get done with copyright, and it is more obvious eve

So what you're saying is that RMS has the simplistic world view of a toddler, where everything is black and white, and no middle ground exists - say, where a person creating a book, or film, or song, is happy to share his creation with the world, but stipulates that anybody wanting to take a copy of that work should give him $2 as compensation? In this world view, either you share everything with everybody, or you share nothing and exist in isolation.

Any "forced" sharing or "forced" compensation is morally wrong. If a musician says, "I have created this song. If you want a copy, I want $1 from you," then there are three possible scenarios:1) Is the song valuable to you? Do you enjoy it? Do you believe that $1 is an reasonable trade for the value that song represents to you, and are you okay with the "don't share with other people" restriction? If so, then conclude the transaction.2) Is the song not valuable to you? Why would you want to take a copy at all, then? Patronize musicians whose business model and asking price are more palatable to you.3) Is the song of some value to you, but you either disagree with the price or the "no redistribution" stipulation? Then open a negotiation with the musician - if you reach an agreement that both of you are happy with, conclude your transaction. If you can't reach a mutually agreeable plan, then the song is not worth the price, and you walk away from the transaction.

That is it - there is no "right" for you to take whatever you want whenever you want it. There is no "right" for the musician to take money from you if you don't want to give it - any answer to this "problem" that does not involve a mutually agreeable voluntary transaction between the purchaser and the seller is immoral.

Incidentally - why is it that people who hold this simplistic world view are also some of the most vocal critics of social media? If sharing is always ethical, shouldn't anything that encourages more sharing be an unequivocally ethical thing as well? And why do you care if somebody else gets value out of what you've shared? Sharing shouldn't have a price tag associated with it, right?

Except that this isn't about 'rights', this is about a business model.

If your business model is to produce music files and sell them, in this marketplace where the vast bulk of music files are not paid for, then you're an idiot and the market will quickly drive you bankrupt. This isn't about morals, or ethics, but simple business sense.The old business model of producing recordings of music and selling them is broken. It was enabled by the technology to record music, and it has been broken by the technology

Again, it's not about morals or ethics, and framing the argument as a moral choice *is* a straw man. This is a business we're talking about, not an ethics convention.

The common practice of the market, whether you like that or not, whether the creator of content likes that or not, is that musical tracks are freely available for no cost. That's maybe not an ideal situation for people to create content in, but it does accurately describe reality. You can say that that's 'immoral' all you want, but that's irrel

RMS' concept of sharing here is about that of a spoiled brat 10 year old.

Anyway, your last paragraph is a PERFECT way to illustrate how dumb this is.

Let's replace ARTIST with his GNU organization. Let's replace the copyrighted MUSIC where the 'right' to distribute is controlled through a purchased license with GPL'd GNU SOFTWARE where the 'right' distribute it is controlled through the GPL license.

By your logic (and possibly his), a person that happens to find GNU software on a torrent someplace with all the licenses stripped out is perfectly entitled to 'share' and take that copy and use it however they see fit (perhaps in their closed-source products?). There's no reason they'd then be bound by the distribution terms on the GPL at that point, would there? After all, if you find some music on a server someplace, you're no longer bound to respect the distribution terms of THAT, so why so with software?

Record companies are (almost all) horrible, horrible things that scam (almost all) artists out of their hard work without paying them a dime... but this is just stupid.

RMS should stick to fighting to convince the creators of things to make them free to share. The terms that makers (and their agents) apply to their creations' use should be respected. The fight is to convince people to change the terms, not to selectively ignore the ones you don't like.

I have used free software, and I've shared code back out of a sense of reciprosity. That's a good thing. However, I totally reserve the right to decide on a case-by-case basis what products of my labor are free to share and what I might decide to charge money for.

"The cost to copy is nothing, so it must be free" is BULLSHIT. Products are not 100% production costs. There's the initial development cost, sometimes advertising costs, office space costs, etc. The decision a person or company makes to produce something is based on looking at all of these costs together and trying to see if the sales will be worth ALL the costs.

Just saying "obviously by copying this so easily your business model sucks, so free music for me and you totally deserve to go broke, fool" is not much different than "your front door was open, and it was TOTALLY easy to just walk in and take your stuff... your ownership of things model sucks... so you totally deserve to lose everything, fool". Both things very well could be foolish, given the environment... but that doesn't make actively taking advantage of that person and enriching yourself at their expense right.

What RMS should be arguing for is a boycott of old-school record companies and an embracing of music from artists who promote sharing of their music and aren't represented by bags of slime. Only, there's a lot of good music out there you can only get from record companies... and most people wouldn't know where to start to find the other kinds of artists... and all their friends are listening to the record company music... so that's hard.

Emily DID WRONG in going the easy route and just taking music that should have been bought. Not a lot of wrong, in the scheme of things (especially given the victims).... but wrong nonetheless.

It feels good to give... and it feels GREAT to give something that doesn't cost anything to give. That doesn't make it universally right. The world is more complex than "it feels good so it must be right". Grow up, RMS.

I think what RMS is saying is that all music should be distributed with a license disclosing what can and can not be done with it. It would only add 20-25 minutes to each song to read out the music distribution license that would be required on every song.

The Gnu Public Music license would require that it be copied along with the song, and that any derivative work distributed to anyone also bear the 25 minute GPM license. Also, all the tracks required to remix the music must be made available to anyone the song is distributed to. Any remixes distributed must also bear the GPM license. And no patented technologies can be used to make the music.

The price doesn't trend to zero. There is one price, that which the artist sets.

I agree that the artist shouldn't go after people who _download_ his songs illegally. But if you do happen to upload it, then you deserve what's coming. By uploading the song for other's to download, you are depriving the artist of a market, and that is injurious to the artist.

If you disagree with an artist's price, then don't buy their record. If you do go to look for illegally provided copies of their songs, then you are getti

Arguing that software has rights is even more delusional than Romney's believe that corporations are people,

I think that depends on what you consider to be "rights" and where you believe the rights lie. We routinely declare objects to be historical or natural landmarks and that designation includes protection from vandalism, destruction, exploitation and so forth. The object has effectively been given a right to continued existence. Is it delusional of us to have done that?

The majority of the US also believes that books shouldn't be banned or burned. Not only that, but we generally believe they should be available for free to those who seek them out (which is why we have libraries). Books have effectively been given not only the right to exist, but the right to be read. Is that delusional?

I'm not sure just what rights RMS thinks software should have because I hate his writing style and can never finish reading any of his diatribes, but it's not entirely out of the question to say that an object effectively has some rights. I would probably disagree with RMS about what those rights are, but I wouldn't say that arguing that software has rights is delusional.

No, it isn't. Copyright is a government monopoly, which is theoretically, given to authors

a) for a limited time

b) with the express goal to promote creativity

It is not morally correct to break this rationale, yet it has already been broken by the copyright holders many times. Unfortunately, corrective action has not happened, because the economic incentives happen to be asymmetrically distributed. The large harm the violations by the copyright holders have caused is spread over many people, while the huge benefits have accrued to very few, who make a lot of extra profits and engage in all sorts of rent-seeking activities that extend and defend the violations of the original agreement.

Apparently you completely misunderstood the point I was trying to convey. Not all laws are just. That's it. This "agreement" that not everyone even agreed to (an agreement you didn't agree to doesn't actually exist) might not be just either. Hence, his statement that it's not "morally correct" to break it isn't necessarily true.

No one mentioned anything about stealing. As far as I'm aware, this is about copyright infringement, which has a separate legal definition.

Children are starving in Africa and you give a shit about a fucking NPR File Sharer's Blog? Fuck you. Instead of shooting electron beams at a NPR File Sharer's Blog to see what happens these scientists should be in the wheat fields growing food for starving children in 3rd world countries.

The children are starving not because of a scarcity of food but because certain people in Africa are PREVENTING the foodfrom getting to the people who need it.

If you really truly want to make the world a better place, kill yourself.

It's fairly straightforward.Let me try to explain: File sharing undermines somebody else's business model.Anybody who wants to make money by selling "digital artefacts" is basically screwed.People at large have no problem sharing digital artefacts with everybody else on the internet, meaning that only one sale is required -- often times not even that.Copy protection, dongles, etc, all exist to try to protect the business model, but typically these only get in the way of the legitimate user, so...All this ha

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."

Sure, there will always be artists willing to hold part-time jobs to subsidise their art. And corporate-produced junk designed to sell shoes.

I'd simply prefer a society where people could make an honest living selling high-quality digital artefacts without having every ass-hat on the internet deciding that it's their universal right to copy any data they can get their hands on. This is clearly impossible though, so that's why I'm working on a plague of self-replicating robot spiders with which to take over the world and enforce my will.

Even though I am sympathetic with the author, that is some of the shittiest writing I've seen in a while, which is telling considering the level of writing on the internet.
"It's not bad because it's good" is hardly a compelling argument.

Absolutely not. The idea that "society" (whatever that consists of) is able to decide what is right or wrong makes no sense. If "society" is able to determine right or wrong we should be spitting on Rosa Park's grave, after all, she broke the law which was written by "society" to mandate that public transportation be segregated by race.

We should be praising Stalin, after all, the vast majority of the things he did once in power were perfectly legal, same with every other tyrant with legal power.

You're assuming that what's legal is in the interest of the people, or at least a majority of them. Especially when you're talking about tyrants and repressive regimes, that's not at all true. And even in "democratic" societies, those in power care a lot more about themselves than the people they're supposed to represent. See the two-party political system of the US, where you get the chance to vote for the "lesser of two evils" every four years. You call that democratic? It's no wonder this system produced

Stallman seems to think that society doesn't have the ability to define right and wrong. Apparently he ascribes to solipsism. He thinks that HE is empowered to determine right and wrong for society. How narcissistic is that?

The process of society defining right and wrong requires people like Stallman saying their ideas about right and wrong out loud. There's nothing narcissistic about that, that's how it works.

His opinions are welcomed to me and to a lot of people. Don't confuse your prejudices to other people's. Stallman's opinions may be too radical in many issues to the tastes of many people, but he defends above all else the right of anyone to have his own opinion and to think for himself.

Only what you can defend with a stick belongs to you. If you claim ownership of something big, you need a big stick to defend it. However, there is no stick big enough to defend a monopoly on an idea.

Your ideas sound nice and seem grand, but they utterly fail to address the issue of compensation. Artists need to eat, they cannot work without compensation of some sort for what they produce. If you have a problem with how much they are asking for their material then simply don't purchase it- taking it is not ethical nor is it moral. If society really does benefit in the ways you mention, then society should be required to compensate the artists for what they produce.

That's because the issue of compensation is utterly insignificant. Many great advances in art, science and technology were made without any expectation of compensation. Those creators did it just for the sake of creating something new. If you say that compensation somehow has to be an integral part of the creat

The world needs people like RMS... really. I mean, he is out there on the fringe, where rational thought breaks down into fantasy, but you also have a lot of people in power who are at the other extreme and also living in a kind of fantasy bubble.... heavily subsidized by corporate players of course to ensure they see things the "right" way.

Like so many things in life, the right way isn't always the left or the right, the blue or the red, the democrat or republican, or whatever... its the middle ground where interests from all sides are considered.

On my way home, ill be driving down the central reservation, just to make this point.:-D

I mean, he is out there on the fringe, where rational thought breaks down into fantasy

He practices what he preaches. I don't agree with him fully, but there are few espousing ideals that can claim the same.

you also have a lot of people in power who are at the other extreme and also living in a kind of fantasy bubble.... heavily subsidized by corporate players of course to ensure they see things the "right" way.

It's funny that people attack RMS, and fail to acknowledge that the powers-that-be are pushing in, and succeeding in getting to, the polar opposite of his stance. My guess is they just feel the need to attack someone.

Yeah, because the makers of Kazaa giving away for free a program that she voluntarily decided to use that gave her access to tons of free music is totally mistreatment.

You really have no idea who RMS is at all do you? He's saying the end (the benefits of Kazaa) aren't justified by the means (Kazaa delivered in the form of a closed source binary). This isn't some new revelation from him as he's being singing this tune for over 30 years now. You don't have to agree with Stallman but when you espouse a fundamental ignorance of his positions it doesn't give any credibility to your arguing his opposite.

It's funny that people attack RMS, and fail to acknowledge that the powers-that-be are pushing in, and succeeding in getting to, the polar opposite of his stance.

Geeks have never had compelling marketing skills. Politicians specialize in manipulation. This is why the good guys lose.

I like the idea of FOSS and I write plenty of my own open software, but I can't help but visualize the community as a whole being a bunch of spoiled, self-entitled children. I'm rational enough to understand what RMS is actually saying, but the image of the bratty hippie still dances in my head whenever I hear him talk. There's a reason why he's so famous and yet still has relatively

Let's make examples. I'm interested.When RMS tells Linus "Bitkeeper is a bad idea", he turns out right.When RMS talks about windows as a virus/spyware, he turns out right, you let your PC be owned in the friggin' TOS.When he dreams up a world of free software, which was the frigging NORM in the real world of early computers, the dream gets real, albeit for a very limited set of hardware.

RMS is an idealist? of course. But the effects of his position is, practically, useful to return control in the hand of the user. And that is pragmatically good for the user in the long run.

If you want to hear pure unadulterated fantasy, listen to CEOs and politicians. Elop and his "nokia is betting all on winphones", anyone?

And I say all this while deeply disagreeing on him on this issue.

A guy wants to give his intellectual creation only to those who pay? LET HIM, DO NOT COPY THOSE DAMN FILES. YOU ARE NOT STEALING BUT YOU ARE NOT RESPECTING THE OWNER'S WISH.

But also: HE MUST BE PREVENTED FROM MAKING PEOPLE LISTEN TO HIS STUFF FOR FREE. Because that is akin to the first free hit a crack dealer GIVES OUT. IT IS NOT FAIR TO LET ME LISTEN FOR FREE AND THEN ASKING ME TO PAY CAUSE I WANT THE SONG WHO GOT STUCK IN MY HEAD.And also: WHENEVER HIS CREATION IS FOUND TO BE PARTIALLY UNORIGINAL HE MUST GIVE PEOPLE BACK THE MONEY THEY SPENT ON IT IN THE PROPORTION OF UNORIGINAL VS ORIGINAL CONTENT.

That means that society should try to lift up the least affluent members of society as much as possible. Sometimes a degree of wealth inequality may do this, but only when the ROI is higher and then redistributed.

3. Wealth inequality causes less efficient economies

How so?

(Asking seriously, not snarkily.)

For several reasons:1. The law of diminishing returns occurs, say for example the ROI on college education VS a traditional investment vehicle.2. The utility per opportunity cost is lower, for example a Lamborghini vs several entry level sedans.3. The total factor productivity of labor time falls,

A) You have 10 people. 9 get $1. The tenth gets 1E6-9 dollars. Everyone is better off than before. Minimum gain is $1.B) You have 10 people. Everyone get $100,000. Everyone is better off than before. Minimum gain is $100,000, *and can be no larger*.

I agree with Stallman that 110 year copyrights are repressive. But so too is complete abolishment of copyrights. People like to get paid for their creations, and put food on the table. A reasonable compromise would be 10 or 20 years... just long enough to cover the audio engineer/artist/musicians' labor on the song. But short enough that it becomes part of society's shared culture.

BTW ever notice that no Roman or Greek music has survived til today? We have all their other literature but not their songs. Perhaps because there was no monetary incentive for musicians to share their work.

If people want to get paid for their creations, then why do they bloody insist on giving it away for free on a $10 CD or $2 of Internet bandwidth?

Musicians just don't seem to be able to understand that they're not CD manufacturers, and they're not Internet Service Providers, they can't charge for CDs, and they can't charge for Internet copying. What they can charge for is only their music... which they're stupidly giving away. People is already being generous when they buy plastic or bandwidth from them (being able to buy it from cheaper stores) just so they get their cut and try to recover their creation costs, but that's the wrong way to go about it.

Artist, does it cost you $60,000 to make your work (include your own salary)?... Pro-tip: Sell it for $60,000, not for $0.99. If your work is really worth that, people will pay the cost. Set up a kickstarter and watch it happen. If your work isn't worth what it costs, then there's no market for you. Tough. But please stop all this lunacy, we need it to stop freaking yesterday.

-Sincerely, an audio engineer who understands what is wrong with the businesss

I think I understand what you're saying, though you say it in a silly way. A song isn't bandwidth, it's the manifestation of a creative work.

People still desire particular songs, and we're in a golden age where the music industry has responded to that desire by making nearly every song available in an unrestricted quality format worldwide at an exceptionally reasonable price! Saying artists insist on this or calling it "lunacy" is a bizarre twisting of history, this is exactly what consumers said they wante

BTW ever notice that no Roman or Greek music has survived til today? We have all their other literature but not their songs. Perhaps because there was no monetary incentive for musicians to share their work.

RMS needs a competent proofreader for the articles he posts to his site. Why do people persist in publishing text whose intended audience is the entire fucking world without bothering to make damned certain that at least grammar and spelling are correct?

I respect RMS' position on software, even if I don't fully agree with it. As I understand it, he says that a software developer should be able to make money by selling services, e.g. maintaining/customizing software, and there are people out there who do just that.

But I think the argument falls down for music. Sure, following the 'services' argument, performers can make a living (in theory) by performing the music. But not all song-writers are also performers. So in this case, how would RMS propose that a songwriter get reimbursed? What about the people involved in the production of music, e.g. sound engineers.

I think the "music is like software and should be just as free" analogy does no't work.

(This is not to support the RIAA's unacceptable use of the the courts to prosecute the token file-sharing user with outrageous and probably unconstitutional damage judgements.)

GPL itself is a protest of copyright laws, that depends on copyright laws for its existence. If there was no copyright law, GPL would not exists, and RMS would be happy about it (Well EULA should go too, but that is a different topic). But until copyright law exists, RMS would like to defend the free rights of GPL using copyright laws.

This has been repeated on every RMS and GPL post, and still someone has to write this. Sigh.

If there was no copyright law, GPL would not exists, and RMS would be happy about it

That is not so, and RMS himself was very explicit about it. He would only agree to copyright going away if there was some other arrangement in the laws that would let him enforce copyleft - ideally, he wants copyleft to be universally legally enforced. Quote [computerworlduk.com]:

"I would be glad to see the abolition of copyright on software if it were done in such a way as to ensure that software is free. After all, the point of copyleft is to achieve that goal for derivatives of certain programs. If all software were free, copyleft would not be needed for software. However, abolishing copyright could also be done in a misguided way that would have no effect on typical proprietary software (which is restricted by EULAs and source code secrecy rather than copyright), and only undermines the practice of copyleft. Naturally I would be against that. In other words, I am more concerned with how the law affects users' freedom than with what happens to copyright as such.

It would be necessary to eliminate copyright on software, declare EULAs legally void, and adopt consumer protection measures that require distribution of source code to the user and forbid tivoization."

This has been repeated on every RMS and GPL post, and still someone has to write this. Sigh.

Indeed; and every time someone replies the way you did, I have to link to that article to show why you're wrong.

If there was no copyright law, GPL would not exists, and RMS would be happy about it

Think about this: if there was no copyright law, it would be as if all software was implicitly licensed with a BSD-style license. I doubt RMS would be really happy with that, because nobody would be forced to share.

You can repeat this lame argument all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that RMS is adopting a self-contradictory position.

Would you care to explain why you believe this is lame?

The fact is that the GPL restricts the free sharing that RMS was advocating for other creative works and uses the copyright law he often criticizes to do so.

Er, as I said GPL depends on copyright law. So for GPL to work he does have to use copyright law, even though he despises copyright law. Though, as I said (and you conveniently ignored), he would be glad if GPL and copyright law disappear altogether at the same time. GPL restricts sharing to promote free software (logically copyright free software, legally GPL software), which I think is necessary as long as copyright exists.

You should check your reading comprehension. I never said one can do evil if the end is good. I only said if a thing exists and is being used for evil, and I start using it for good. Then there is nothing bad about it.

Sure, while technically using free software instead of closed alternatives would have been better, its a completely irrelevant point in the context of Emily's post (never mind the fact that free alternatives to some of the software she used simply didn't exist at the time she needed them, or had so few peers comparatively as to be useless.)

Emily White violated the copyrights on the music she acquired ("I've swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo"). You'd think RMS would be against that, since the GPL expresses (admirable IMO) restrictions on what you can do with it under those same copyright laws. His arguments why Emily "did nothing wrong" are mostly the lame tired shit piracy apologists have trotted out for decades now

After all, how can we support musicians? Buying recordings from record companies won't do it. For nearly all records, the musicians get none of that money; the record companies keep it. See this article [informatio...utiful.net] and this article [techdirt.com].

Untrue. Artist royalties are often ~20% of the sales price; this chart [informatio...utiful.net] says $.09 for an iTunes download, and artists self-releasing through CD Baby keep 75%. The meme that artists don't get money seems to be a deliberate misunderstanding of the money record companies advance against royalties so artists can make a quality record (The Trichordist explains this well). Regardless of the percentage it is not the consumer's right or job to decide if that's a reasonable or obscene deal from the record company and online store. FFS, if you don't like a song enough to pay $0.99 for an unprotected DRM-free legal copy of it so the artist gets some money in exchange for your enjoyment of her creative endeavor:

1. Skip it and enjoy the zillions of free songs out there — under CC share licenses, out-of-copyright, in the public domain, live performances from trade-friendly artists on Internet Archive [archive.org], etc.! As RMS knows from software, there are great free alternatives to restricted paid works, so go support those!

2. If you whine "Waahhh, this song I want ought to be free like all those others" so you pirate it anyway, your parents raised you badly.

RMS goes on

Practically speaking, the only effective and ethical way you could support musicians was through concerts.

Not true. Paying for the copyrighted recordings you want and love works great and delivers money to artists so they can make more! It's insulting to suggest artists should instead try to collect money for something completely different — "touring and T-shirts&quot. (No Sgt. Pepper for you, John Paul George and Ringo are going deaf on another tour that only their teenybopper fans attend.) The idea that artists should not charge for a quality studio recording has been immensely damaging to "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" in the area of recorded music, it's a big reason why today's songs are made on laptops instead of with crack session musicians. And as RMS later acknowledges, touring doesn't even work for those bands that do perform live, because they can't afford to travel to all their fans, then on any night only a fraction of fans in an area make it to the show.

RMS is on better ground with the first of his two ways to support artists

Put a tax on Internet connectivity, and divide the money among artists.

Great idea, let's hope it happens. But his second is a fantasy:

Give each player device a button to send 50 cents anonymously to the artists.

It's been tried, the Fairtunes service [wired.com] during Napster's golden era. I ponied up money for a song I shared, but in several y

RMS is typically strident and way off-course from the meat of Emily White's post and David Lowery's response. His ridiculous solution for compensating artists is to tax internet access and distribute the profits to artists in a scaled manner via some sort of popularity poll. RMS should've stayed out of this debate.

When music was imprinted on a physical good, the music itself was physical. It was part of something you bought, touched. The cover art, liner notes, it was part of the experience of the music. Paying for the music was as much a certainty as paying for a magazine or cup of coffee. No one debated that owning music meant you paid for it.

When you transfer the concept of music to a digital realm, that breaks down. I think that humans by and large have trouble with the concept of digital goods. They see it as theoretical. The experience is no longer tangible. And so by proxy, the artist itself becomes theoretical, intangible. And when that happens, the moral imperative that the artist be compensated goes out the window. And you can see that in Emily's post. She states that she doesn't think she and her peers "will ever pay for albums." She drive to a coffee shop to spend money on her organic, fair trade latte to make sure workers in Columbia are fairly compensated for their labor, but she won't pay for music because it's too inconvenient.

So why is it she and her generation will pay extra for fair trade coffee, but not pay an artist for their work? I can only conclude that her brain cannot process that the music streaming in to her iPhone and her laptop was actually created by people who labored equally. It's just something that exists intangibly, but still something that she desires be omnipresent in her life.

The lack of attachment to a physical good is one part of it, but there is a wider social shift at work here. We have seen a shift from pre-war craftsman trades to post-war industrialized society, and now to a western society that format-shifted to only create ideas, not products. The average person in western countries no longer associates products with the people who create them. Why should they, when most things are mass-produced in Chinese, Taiwanese, and Indian factories? So when even tangible products become detached from the human context in which they were created, younger generations that grew up after this shift to globalized production will not imagine or care that digital goods were products produced by real people who are struggling to get by. This is a much tougher nut to crack than the immediate issues of digital music.

So then it's okay to make a derivative work from a GPL work and distribute it without the source code, as long as you do it for free and are "sharing"? Think for just a minute about why that's not the case.

The "repressive" laws that say that sharing copyrighted content that you didn't get pemission to make distributable copies of are the exact same "repressive" copyright that makes enforcing the GPL possible.

And RMS stance on that issue is that in the absence of copyright there would not be as significant a need for the GPL. The GPL is a way to mitigate the damage of copyright, it's not a substitute for abolishing it.

Does that mean that if it's okay for other people to ignore proprietary copyright, then people can also freely ignore the GPL and make and distribute derivative works of GPL products without source code?

No, that's not what he said. Don't worry, others have deliberately misconstrued what he has said on the topic in the past. Also, he's talking about music which doesn't have the "proprietary" vs. "free" distinction (the only way to have proprietary music is to never, ever share it.)

I don't believe that Stallman said anything about the copyrights themselves. His point was, again, about the implied (false) moral weight behind declaring "sharing" as being wrong (something opposite to what we're taught as children.) He then proceeds to point out fairly common failings of the music industry as a whole and the laws surrounding copyright, and basically makes the point that there are systematic flaws in the way we compensate artists and that the status quo basically feeds the machine that tries to shove crap like SOPA/PIPA down our throats.

Comparing the wrong thing. GPL is not about lawfullness, GPL is about morals (it just happens to have a legal background, "because we can", or as I've read somewhere, "to turn copyright against itself and make it copyleft"). We think it's not moral to try to restrict the natural flow of information, which GPL promotes, and "proprietary copyright" forbids. Enough said. There are no inconsistencies in RMS's support of file sharing.

Did you even read her shitty little article? What this "Emily" moron did was (except for a little file sharing with Kazaa in fifth grade) is trade mix-tapes and songs with -- as she stated -- "family and friends".

That is NOT the same as file sharing. That is NOT the same as bit torrent and "piracy" and "copyright infringement" (no matter what side you fall down on in those issues). "sharing mix tapes and songs from family and with friends" has generally been considered fair-use and has been done for DECADES. I am fucking shocked at the responses I've seen all over the place -- showing the extreme fucking ignorance of idiots everywhere -- acting as if trading a mix-tape or duplicating an album for your girlfriend or your brother is the same as going to the pirate bay and uploading and seeding the latest #1 billboard album.

I mean, fucking seriously, what the fuck?!

And what makes this rambling 20 year old moron's comments even dumber is that she's convinced that she did something wrong. We now live in a world where we have children CONVINCED that SHARING MUSIC WITH AN ACTUAL FRIEND OR FAMILY MEMBER is the same thing as operating a massive piracy/duplication crime syndicate that pumps out $5 copies of DVDs and CDs on the streets of new york and that she has somehow committed some sort of crime or even some sort of copyright infringement (she hasn't).

Fuck, I completely give up. There is no more hope. The mindless idiots have let the corporations dictate to them what is and isn't appropriate and fair use and we've passed that on to an entire generation or two of children who now just accept that it's wrong, because they don't know any better and assume that corporations get to have absolute and complete control on everything, because they say so, and anything contradicting them must be theft and must be a crime.

RMS has strongly opposed copyright for a long time, and wants to abolish it and substitute the legal requirement for anyone to provide source to any software they distribute. (In effect, tyrannically imposing a "free" license on everything.) He invented "copyleft" (and its GPL embodiment) as a temporary measure, turning copyright against its rent-seeking purpose, until such time as he can achieve his goals legislatively.

However, it's not at all clear whether he'd be okay with simply invalidating copyright (making everything public domain, aka actual freedom, but permitting binary distribution of closed- and open-source alike), or if he prefers to keep copyright+GPL until he can bring about his "utopian" laws.

Does that mean that if it's okay for other people to ignore proprietary copyright, then people can also freely ignore the GPL and make and distribute derivative works of GPL products without source code?

New here? This is RMS's (and a good chunk of/.ers') mindset:

Sharing is moral, thus he doesn't mind, whether or not you break the law to do so.Distributing software and NOT distributing source is immoral, thus he does mind, whether or not you break the law to do so.

He's a zealot; morality (in his definition -- if you disagree, you're wrong and/or evil!) matters, law doesn't. He only cares about law inasmuch as it can be useful club to beat people with.

Copyright is, first, last, and *ALWAYS*, about control, not monetization. Where the creator of a work is simply wanting to retain some measure of exclusivity on who may copy the work.

Before the printing press was invented, copying was error prone and hard enough that the difficulty magnitude of doing this tended to create its own checks and balances, preventing unauthorized copying from spreading out of control. After copying became much cheaper and easier to do, however, some incentive that authors could still enjoy a limited amount of the exclusivity of control they had over their works was offered in the form of a legal social contract: copyright, wherein the general public would basically agree to not copy the work, and so the author would have incentive to publish the work in the first place, without any self-censoring, and thereby provide the public with cultural enrichment.

Owing to the effects of the legally recognized exclusivity of control on who may copy a given work creates a type of monopoly, which affects the supply-demand curve, and in a capitalistic society, this effect happens to be monetizable, but that is not the actual underlying purpose of copyright - it is to encourage authors to publish so that society and the general public can benefit. If the public does not respect the copyright, then the artist's confidence in that system to protect their interests is shaken, and they can or will resort to other means to protect them, such as reducing the amount that they publish, or restricting the types of content that they publish so that only certain people can easily acquire it. DRM, which is being used by an ever increasing number of publishers, is exactly one such response to their shaking confidence in copyright to protect their interests, and is just one form of the self censorship that copyright itself was originally created to discourage.

At least in the Anglosphere, your explanation is bogus. In English/Commonwealth/USA law, copyright has never been about authors' control of their work, in any sense but a veneer of legislative respectability.

Authors didn't fight for the Statute of Anne, for-profit publishers did -- whether for money per se or for monetizable control makes no difference -- and they sought it as the publishers' natural right. The vesting of copyright in authors, and the ostensible quid pro quo of a short-term monopoly to ince

Why would that be a no-no, exactly? What makes making derivative work to a GPL work and distributing it without the source (even for free) any less, or more, of an infringement on copyright than sharing copies that you made of somebody else's copyrighted work without permission? As far as I can see they are *IDENTICAL*.

Correct, it's perfectly ok to ripoff GPL code, so long as your workflow is 100% free software. If you plan on pasting it into visual studio, that's a no-no.

Well, given that RMS has just stated that "it's good when strangers share through peer-to-peer networks", which almost certainly violates the copyright and licensing terms on the music and movies being shared - I don't think your statement is correct.

So my takeaway from today is it's obviously okay to take GPL software and use it however I want, regardless of whether or not my use violates the terms defined within the GPL. RMS doesn't feel other licenses need to be honored, so there's no compelling reason t

What you say you're taking away from this is pretty much what I'm seeing here as well... and to be quite frank, it confuses the hell out of me. I see no way to interpret what RMS has said here other than to presume that he advocates the abolition of copyright. But under copyright abolition, there would be absolutely nothing to force people to release source code of derivative works just because the author wanted it... which kind of goes against where I formerly understood RMS's primary stance to be in.

So my takeaway from today is it's obviously okay to take GPL software and use it however I want, regardless of whether or not my use violates the terms defined within the GPL. RMS doesn't feel other licenses need to be honored, so there's no compelling reason to follow the terms of his licenses. So lets start using it in our commercial devices, modify it however we want and not bother releasing the source.

I don't think that that reasoning holds water. It's not about copyright law. Copyright is just a tool. RMS' key idea (as I interpret it) is that technology has given us the ability to copy information and knowledge and art and records (as in recordings of historical events), and that this copying allows us to share these things with everyone. He believes that the potential benefit of this sharing to humanity is so large that it outweighs anything else. After all, knowledge is power, and knowledge increases freedom. So, we must share as much information and knowledge and art and records as we can for the betterment of us all.

So what about software? Is taking a piece of software and distributing it in binary form sharing of information and knowledge? Well, what happens is that, if it's well-written software that fits the user's needs, it lets the user do something with less effort. It doesn't communicate anything about how it's done though, so that the user learns nothing, and it creates a dependency of the user on the software manufacturer. Once the user has chosen to use the binary-only software, they are no longer free to arbitrary change what they're doing, they have to ask the manufacturer to change the software.

Contrariwise, if the software is distributed with source code included, then this is a case of sharing information and knowledge. The user can learn how the software does things on their behalf, and is free to change how the software does things on their behalf. And that makes the world a little better. Again, this is not an opinion about copyright law. In one case following this ideal happens to entail violating copyright laws, while in another it doesn't. That just means that current copyright laws have some good and some bad effects, nothing more.

>>>Yes, Kazaa "mistreated her" by her voluntarily deciding to download, install and use the program without any coercion from the makers of the program

Kazaa usually had tracking bots buried inside of it, or installed alongside it, without ever informing the users. So YES she was harmed by the program. That is what Stallman means by "non-free" - The program was a danger to the users due to its closed-off environment.

>>>One can only hope she won't be scarred for life from that heinous act.

Perhaps not "for life" but she would suffer shorterm scarring if Kazaa or its partners had stolen her ID, or credit card number. You sir are too trusting of the programs you download, if you believe it's okay to just download random shit to your PC w/o any harm.